


Unified Theory

by likeadeuce



Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Crossover, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-14
Updated: 2010-02-14
Packaged: 2017-10-07 06:38:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/62427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/likeadeuce/pseuds/likeadeuce
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fred Burkle and Riley Finn meet at summer (nerd) camp.  Hijinks ensue.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unified Theory

Rating: PG-13  
Characters: Fred/Riley  
Description: Written for the ficathon, backup, at 's request for Fred and Riley, meeting at summer camp or college. I took some of my nerd-camp experiences to create a sort of hybrid of the two. The year is 1992. There is math, and cross country running, and "Back to the Future."  
Disclaimers: Characters mostly belong to Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy, though "Mike Vaughn" is part of the "Alias"-verse.   
Thanks to and for listening to me babble about this.

 

_Unified Theory_

"Is this the line to buy math books?" asked the girl with the pigtails.

Riley looked down on her. Not because he felt superior, to her or to anyone here at the Stanford Summer Accelerated Science Camp. In fact, in his first trip west of Iowa City, surrounded by junior geniuses from all over America, he felt very much at sea. However, he couldn't help looking down, because he had grown seven inches over the past year. He looked down at just about everybody.

In this case, the object of his gaze was a slender girl with thick-framed glasses and chestnut-brown braids. She wore loose jeans, with daisies appliquéd to the pockets, and a tight pink T-shirt that said – and he had to look twice, because she certainly wasn't any older than his own sixteen years, but nope, that was right – "World's Greatest Grandma."

After all that observation, he felt like he should have something more to say, but the best he could come up with was, "Yep. I think this is the line."

She nodded, and he nodded, and she crossed her legs so that the heel of one penny-loafer pressed the toe of the other, and it seemed very likely that neither of them would ever say anything to anyone again, ever, until she looked up, as though she had just remembered something important, and asked earnestly, "What math are you taking?" She did seem very serious, or as serious as a pigtailed sixteen-year old in a Grandma T-shirt could be. Her accent was something Southern, he wasn't sure what, drawl with a touch of twang.

"Statistics," Riley answered. Taking a desperate run at a joke, he added, "Lies and damn lies were both full." The girl just frowned, squinted, and pushed her glasses back onto her nose, as though a better look at him would help him to make sense. Riley tried to explain: "It's a thing my father likes to say. There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics."

"I heard that before," the girl answered, without a hint that she knew it was supposed to be a joke. "I think it's a quotation."

"Yeah." Riley nodded. "Probably. I don't know from where, though." And they fell into silence, again, as though, with their mutual ignorance of the source of that quote, every possible conversational topic between them had been exhausted. This did not bode well, Riley thought, for three weeks at the camp. "My major area is psychology. This is the math I need. Are you in stats?" he asked desperately.

"Oh. No. I did that one a couple years ago." She flushed and dropped her head, and Riley was immediately sorry for making her self-conscious. "They made a special course just for a few of us. Last summer, remember how it was in the news about this guy in Switzerland who thought he had discovered a new digit of pi?" Her shyness seemed to fade as she spoke, a new animation coming into her eyes. "Well, Brandon Hong, who was in the class with us, he did a proof about how it wasn't true, and then the whole class, we wrote a letter, and then the professor called us and. . ." She dropped her eyes again, shifting on her feet. "It was fun. Only Brandon got a scholarship to MIT, which is kind of sad, because he was my best friend and . . ." She rocked back on her feet and looked up at Riley. "Wow, I must sound like I'm feeling sorry for myself instead of being happy for Brandon but. . ." She stopped, and her eyes traveled up Riley's tall figure to his face. "My friend Ricky Simkins, back in Tulip, he has a T-shirt that says, 'No. Do you play miniature golf?'" She gave a quick shy laugh, then looked back at Riley and blushed.

Bewildered by the girl's unexpected monologue, Riley gave a polite laugh, then asked, "Sorry, what?"

"He's tall like you." As if that explained everything. He shook his head. "And everybody always asks if he plays basketball. I'm Fred," she added, as though it was part of the same thought.

"I'm Riley," he replied. "I do play basketball." He frowned. "I haven't seen a court around here though. Do you run?"

"It depends," Fred answered. "On who's chasing me and how scary they look."

"No." Riley frowned. "I meant for exercise."

Then he saw the playful glint in her eyes, and, finally, they were both smiling at once. "It's OK," Fred told him. "No one ever gets my humor at first either.

*

Fred couldn't believe her luck. She had started running cross country during sophomore year, when her mother insisted that she needed an extracurricular that was more "social" than Mathletes or science fair. Never mind that those activities involved a ton of human interaction, while running was, usually, the loneliest thing in the world. Not that she minded; she found it gave her a lot of time to think, not to mention thanking her lucky stars she didn't have the kind of mother who made her go out for cheerleading.

And now, when she had come to camp terrified of being alone, it turned out the first person she met was a cute boy who wanted a running partner. She loved having the opportunity to show that she knew and cared about something besides math.

Upper-level campers were allowed use their recreation time to walk or run in the highlands above the university. A lot of them did, on the first day; the landscape was spectacular and the sky, like almost every day in Palo Alto, was crystal blue and perfect. The trail, on the other hand, went almost straight up and down what was, by local standards anyway, a small mountain. A lot of runners, clearly novices, blazed past Fred and Riley. They kept a slower pace, and took time to stretch. On the way down, they passed a lot of glaring, pulled-hamstring speed demons. And meanwhile they had time to talk.

"I didn't know they had mountains in Texas," Riley said.

"They don't," she frowned. "Not anywhere near Tulip, anyway."

"So what's with the name of your school?" He pointed at her gray gym shirt that read, _Twin Peaks High School: Phys. Ed Department._

"Oh, silly," Fred laughed. "It's from a TV show. A _great_ TV show. I mean, it's over now, but it was just amazing. All about this FBI agent in this tiny town, investigating all these mysterious events. I mean, they have to put it in terms of science fiction, for people to pay attention, but you'd be amazed how much stuff there is that the government doesn't want you to know about."

Riley laughed. "Sorry, Fred, but I don't really buy all this stuff about shady government conspiracies. Before my dad retired from the Army, he was in military intelligence." He shook his head. "So was my granddad, so is my Uncle Roy. You should see them on a fishing trip, or just sitting around some night playing poker. They're not these crazy ciga-smoking conspirators. Just a bunch of ordinary guys."

"There's a lot of stuff that goes on. . ." Fred began.

"Like what?" Riley stopped to stretch, then pointed on the road above them, where a giant white metal dish loomed before them. As large as a football field, and tall as a medium-sized office building, it rose starkly over the rocky terrain, its antennae pointing up at the sky. "You think they use that thing to talk to aliens?"

"Don't be ridiculous." Fred knelt down to lace her shoe. "That's just an old communications transmitter." Fred could have told him where the real dishes were that they used to talk to aliens. She could have given him the number of the reports that the government refused to declassify, ones that could have proven once and for all that scientists were hiding the truth about extraterrestrial contact.

But what was the point? Sometimes Riley made her think of Mike Vaughn, an angel-faced boy she had met at a Mathletes conference in Washington, D.C. . He had walked with her from the Mall to the Jefferson Memorial and kissed her under the budding cherry trees. It was her first real kiss, and the way the breeze from the Tidal Basin touched their faces and ruffled their hair, Fred wondered if this might turn out to be the best day of her life. And then, on the walk home, they had stumbled onto a difference of opinion, regarding the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Vaughn adhered stubbornly – Fred might have even said, irrationally and pigheadedly – to the single-bullet theory, and the very suggestion of CIA involvement started him ranting until she thought a vein might pop in his forehead. He had a lot of veins. By the time they got back to the hotel, they were barely speaking. Their first kiss turned out to be their last.

The sad truth, Fred had decided, was that anyone who was meant to know the truth about conspiracies would have to find out for themselves. Everyone else was probably better off not knowing what the world was really like. So now she just smiled up at Riley, and sprang to her feet, throwing pacing and caution to the wind. "I'll race you to the dish."

*  
After a week, all but the hard core runners had given up on the highlands. Fred and Riley nearly had the path to themselves. On this Friday afternoon, Riley was jogging backwards, down the hill, holding a notepad and pen in his hands. "Just say the first thing that comes to mind," he called.

"Would I mind living in a cave for a year, if I had food and water, and adequate reading material?" Fred frowned, but didn't let her confusion interfere with the regular beat of her strides, or the pace of her breathing. "Why am I in the cave?"

"It doesn't matter. It's just a question."

"Well, I think it does. If I'm living in a cave because I want to live in a cave, then I'm going to feel differently about it than if was trapped in a cave."

"OK." Riley squinted at the paper. "Fair enough. But that's not really the point. The point is to find out how important social interaction is to you."

"If you give this survey to people are you going to look over their shoulder and tell them the point?"

Riley sighed. "Back to the drawing board with that one." Not that all survey subjects were as exacting as Fred, but when writing these things, you had to be prepared for the tough cases. He held out a hand to signal a break, then sat down on a nearby rock. Fred pulled out a water bottle and squirted it over her forehead. Riley's eyes lingered as the liquid flowed down and darkened her T-shirt. She looked up at him, and hastily he flipped the pad to the next set of questions. "Picture yourself at age ten. What did you think you would be when you grew up?"

"An astronaut," she said, confidently, then chewed her lip and looked up at the sky. "Or maybe a florist?"

"Florist?" Riley frowned, taken by surprise.

"Is that bad?" She leaned down into a stretch.

"No," he said hastily. "It just doesn't. . .you don't make me think of flowers."

"Oh?" Fred looked up. "What do I make you think of?"

He was too far in free association mode to stop himself. "Soap."

"Soap!" Fred cried. "I remind you of soap?"

Riley flushed. "When I see you at dinner. After we run, and you're all cleaned up. Most girls smell like flowers or, I don't know, hair spray or something. You just smell. . .clean."

"Clean?" She crossed her arms over her chest, and looked him up and down. "Is this part of the test?"

Riley didn't know how, but he had managed to hurt her feelings, and so he blurted, "Do you want to go to the movie at the student center with me tonight?"

Fred lowered her head, furrowed her brow, and after a moment of concentration said, "No."

"Oh. Well." Riley stuffed the pad in his back pocked and made a point of stretching. "Sure, that's fine."

"Did I mess up your test?"

"Huh?"

"Was that part of the test? Like you were testing what would happen if a boy like you asked a girl like me?"

"No. It wasn't a test."

"Oh. Ask me again."

He looked up. "But you said no."

"I was trying not to be too predictable. Ask me again."

"OK," he smiled. "Fred Burkle, will you go to the movie with me?"

"Hmm." She bit her lip, seeming to think. "What's the movie?"

"You have to know what the movie is?"

"I don't want to sit through a stupid movie."

"I think it's _Back to the Future_."

She squealed and jumped up to hug him. "I love that movie! 'Hello, McFly.'" She giggled, and when she let go, Riley still felt warm and slightly embarrassed from her touch. Then she stepped back. "Wait a minute. Is this going to be one of those thing where I have to show up with my glasses off and let down my hair and everything?"

"I like your glasses," Riley said, honestly.

"Good, because I can't see without them."

"But. . ." He reached a hand out to touch the end of her pigtail. "Your hair might look nice down. I mean – if you want. You might be outgrowing this look a little."

"Riley!" Fred rolled her eyes. "Of course I'm outgrowing this look. The pigtails are ironic."

"Oh." He blinked. "See, back home? We have plenty of completely earnest pigtails." He thought back to their first meeting. "Does that explain the grandma T-shirt too?" She gave him a look. "We don't really have irony in Iowa. I guess I'll have to work on that."

*

"Look up there," Fred sighed, lying back on the grass. "Look at all the stars."

Riley straightened the dorm-room sheet over the dry grass and looked around, instead of up. "I'm not sure we're supposed to be here after dark."

"Really? What makes you think that?" Before he could answer, she leaned forward and tapped his shoulder. "Was it all the 'violators will be prosecuted' signs, or the barbed wire fence we had to cross over?" She considered and amended, "Under."

Riley had insisted there was no way they could get back onto the highlands after hours, but Fred had led them straight to a hole in the chain link fence, which she wriggled through and then pulled back, until it was wide enough for Riley.

"Funny." He reached out and took her hand, squeezing it between his fingers, as he lay back on the blanket.

"Come on," she laughed. "What are they going to do? Deport us?"

"Yes," Riley laughed. "They'll deport us to the Midwest. We'll never be allowed in California again."

"Texas is the South, buddy." She leaned over to smack his breastbone. And then her hand lingered, and she lowered her mouth as if to kiss him. He drew in his breath and then, inches from contact, she stopped. "Vanilla," she said.

"What?" Riley blinked.

"You said I smell like soap." She traced a finger down his chest and stopped just over the navel. "You –" she poked him, to emphasize each word, "Smell – like – vanilla."

"Um." He laughed, sucking in his breath. "Is that bad?"

"It's better than soap." She flopped on her back next to him. "And here I thought we were going to spend tonight at the movie."

"Well," said Riley. "I have never actually been kicked out of a movie before."

"You weren't," Fred said generously. "I was." She shrugged. "Who knew I'd get that excited about it?"

"Some people do like to hear the actors speak the lines themselves."

"Overrated," Fred announced. She lay back, stretched arms over her head, and closed her eyes. Riley leaned up on one elbow to look at her smile. Fred opened one eye. "You can kiss me now," she said.

"I was thinking about it," Riley admitted.

"Stop thinkin'," she said, then giggled, then pursed her lips as he leaned down over her.

His fingers stopped on the rim of her glasses. "Do you mind if I take these off now?"

"Why not?" she said. "You're cute when you're blurry."


End file.
